[_fizz_buzz_]

This is true for other domains also. My wife translates for an ecommerce business. A lot of what she does is very automated. The software she uses remembers all phrases she has translated and uses a word bank she manages for special parts and uses DeepL for new translations which are then only proofread and fine tuned. It's amazing how much stuff she can translate that way in a day (no idea how many thousands words). She is kind of managing and overseeing an AI (DeepL) and sanity checking the work. If this was 20 years ago one would probably need a translation department of 10-15 people to do the same work. However, her company would have never been able to justify that kind of cost. So, in my view: Software and AI made translators probably more than 10x more efficient in the last 10 years, however the amount of stuff that gets translated also increased 10 fold during this time.

[sanderjd]

Yep! I think this is both the optimistic case, and the version of the future that seems most likely to me.

I'm still a bit bummed about it, because just writing and structuring code is something that often brings me joy (and maybe your wife feels similarly about the actual translation work...), but at the end of the day, I realized well before all this AI craze that it really isn't the most valuable thing I do in my job.